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F1 pundit Peter Windsor has blamed Mercedes for the crash between teammates Lewis Hamilton and George Russell at the Qatar GP. The drivers collided with each other on turn one of the first lap as Lewis, starting the race on soft tires, tried to make a move around the outside but unfortunately clipped his teammate.
As a result, Lewis Hamilton was instantly out of the race while George Russell's W14 sustained damage but he managed to finish the race in P4. After the race, Hamilton apologized to Russell and the team for the crash.
F1 pundit Peter Windsor recently weighed in on the incident. He believes that the crash has been inevitable since Mercedes decided to sign George Russell alongside Lewis Hamilton. Talking about the perils of having two elite drivers together in the same team, Windsor said in a YouTube video on his channel:
“If you’re going to have them next to one another on the grid, which they were, P2 and P3, and you’re going to put one of them, i.e. the guy in P3, on soft tires and the other guy on mediums, because what you would then need to do, what Lewis would need to do is before the race, they would need to say to the other driver, ‘Look, Lewis is on the soft tire, he may well try something on the outside, so whatever you do, stay on the inside, and make sure that you two do not touch one another’."
Windsor added:
“And you could have said that to a Valtteri, you could have said that to a Sergio Perez, you could say that to a Carlos Sainz probably, if he was in a Mercedes and Lewis was the other driver, but you can’t say it to a George Russell. George Russell is too much of a racer, he’s a proven winner already, there is absolutely no way in the world that George Russell would have accepted that."
"The management have absolutely no control over them now": Windsor about Mercedes' George Russell and Lewis Hamilton
Windsor also talked about how the tension between Russell and Hamilton would have been worse had the Silver Arrows been competing for the world championship this season. He said:
“That accident was a straight result of choosing to have a driver, an aggressive fast racer like George Russell in the other car. Just imagine if Mercedes were in the running for the World Championship in any given situation in any given year. Imagine what it’d be like between Lewis and George Russell. The management have absolutely no control over them now and there is nothing they can do about it."
It will be interesting to see how the dynamic between Lewis Hamilton and George Russell develops if they have the car to compete at the top end of the F1 grid.
